Smartphone camera-based micron-scale displacement measurement: development and application in soft actuators

Simple and reliable methods for displacement measurements are needed in the areas of sensing, monitoring and actuation. The common methods to measure displacements suffer from issues such as high cost, need for installation space, precise alignment and disturbances in continuous measurements. This paper presents a simple method utilizing a smartphone camera as the primary video capturing device with Matlab to track and measure the deflection of an actuator. The method is validated with known measurements using a microscope micrometer. Further, this paper demonstrates usage of the developed method for measuring the deflection of an actuator based on poly (3,4-ethylene dioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT: PSS) with a least count of 29 microns.

Automated summary

This paper presents a simple method for displacement measurements using a smartphone camera and Matlab software to track and measure the deflection of an actuator. The method is validated with a microscope micrometer and successfully applied to measuring the deflection of an actuator based on poly (3,4-ethylene dioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT: PSS).